University of Melbourne Archives

Accompanying the photographs are captions written by Ms Porter. These captions present an insight into Ms Porter’s reactions to some of the people and places that she saw. Of particular interest are three photographs captioned. The first is an image of a bearded man with a Tilaka painted on his forehead, indicating that he is probably of Indian heritage. This image is captioned The Thoughtful East. The second is an image of two western women, clearly distinguished by their clothing and complexions. One of these women is possibly Una Porter herself. This image is captioned The Thoughtless West. The final image is a group photo of twenty Indian men and one white male. The group are wearing of mixture of western attire and Indian garments. This photo is captioned Masters. Jaupur. Individually, these photographs do not provide any context for their creation and rely entirely on the larger photograph album to provide that context and the story of Ms Porter’s journey throughout South Asia. As the entire photograph album has been digitised along with these photographs, the viewer has access to all of Ms Porter’s time in the sub-continent however and makes these three photographs more poignant as a result. Continue reading ““The Thoughtful East” / “Masters. Jaupur””→

A picture says a thousand words. We all know that ubiquitous and often overused phrase. It is the cornerstone of art analysis and an art historical approach to dissecting pictorial representations. An image presents a visual narrative, conveying a story or meaning through the silent channels of sight. These narratives are fabled to tell a truth, an unaltered vision of the artists’ projected thoughts, or convey a reality of time and place. Photographs have always been revered as a mode of truth telling, as opposed to paintings and other figurative art forms that are imagined from the mind of the artist. Their image captures a moment, and in that scene of suspended time the photographer presents exactly what they saw. We are presented with the perspective of the photographer, or their directed framing of a scene. The image speaks for itself, to use another popular idiom. But what happens when alongside the photograph or series of photographs there are captions and a specific order, all of which were placed and curated by the photographer themselves? Does the meaning alter? And if so, does it reveal a kind of commentary by the photographer? Is this added information then lost in the processes of digitisation and online viewing?

Martyn Jolly has noted that photographic albums were both oral and visual records – their owners would show them to friends and family accompanied by an oral narrative.1 This oral element is of course now lost, but I raise it that we might recognize the importance of situating the individual elements of such archival material within a broader context. In the case of this album, it seems to have been put together to narrate Porter’s philanthropic efforts in India. It is certainly more “formal” in tone than the other Porter album in the archive, which includes photos of family and friends and even her pet dog. One can speculate that Porter would have shown the India album to raise awareness of the situation in India and perhaps to even persuade her audience to support more of such efforts.2 Martyn Jolly, “An Australian Spiritualist’s Personal Cartes-de-Visite Album,” in Shifting Focus: Colonial Australian Photography 1850-1920, ed. Anne Maxwell and Josephine Croci (North Melbourne, Vic: Australian Scholarly Publishing Pty Ltd, 2015), 71–72. Continue reading ““Dom Types””→

Una Porter’s photographic albums, held in the University of Melbourne’s archives, present labelled photographs narrating her journey through China, Hong Kong, Japan, and India during the 1920s. Porter undertook her tour on a philanthropic mission, documenting her travels and compiling two albums of the photos she took. The albums are particularly important in revealing information about Una Porter’s missionary work abroad and the route she took, presenting a visual account of the Western experience in Asia. Continue reading “Una Porter Photo Album”→

Winja Ulupna is an Aboriginal women’s residential drug and alcohol recovery house based in St Kilda. Established in 1976 through Australian Government investment in residential rehabilitation programs controlled by Aboriginal communities, as distinct from State rehabilitation units (Brady 2002), Winja Ulupna, or ‘women’s haven’, was also the first rehabilitation house in Australia specifically for Aboriginal women. As an early example of an Aboriginal women’s run program providing culturally sensitive alcohol and drug services, the poster highlights the importance of community-controlled residential programs in the broader context of a continued denial of the right of self-determination for Indigenous Australians by governments at that time. Designed by Health Productions in 1991 (the art department of the Health Promotion Unit, for the Government of Victoria), the poster is also significant in terms of the history of government-sponsored poster design to disseminate public health messages. Continue reading “‘Winja Ulupna’: Public Health Posters as Visual Culture”→

The 1988 Australian bicentenary was marked by its contradictory history and dual claims for national attention. There was the assertion of settler-colonial nationalism and, in response, a vigorous revival of the movement for Aboriginal land rights and self-determination. In the wake of the indigenous boycott of the celebrations, the Australian Film Institute (AFI) compiled a package of 23 independently-produced films examining various aspects of Aboriginal history, culture and memory. The collection, entitled Picturing Black Australia, the program predominantly comprised Aboriginal-produced films and spanned a breadth of genres ranging from animated short films to feature-length documentaries. Eschewing kitsch derivations of Aboriginality, the films also centred upon realistic portrayals of Aboriginal survival and resistance.[1] Continue reading “‘Picturing Black Australia’”→

‘Capital A Art as it is conventionally understood is at best only a minor contributor to the development of cultural values, about as important as fashion and interior design, in other words not very important at all. The real generator of cultural values in Australia has been the trade union movement and, since the Second World War, increasingly the media…

‘I have always felt that if you were going to get into a dogfight it may as well be with the pit bulls of the union movement rather than the poodles and chihuahuas of the art world.’ Ian Millis, co-founder of the Art and Working Life Program [1]

‘White Australia has a Black History, 1987;, National NAIDOC Poster, Trades Hall Council Collection, 2006-0038-00031. Published under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Available online: http://www.naidoc.org.au/poster-gallery

Mandandanji descendant and Queensland based multidisciplinary artist, Laurie Nilsen (1953) designed the poster ‘White Australia has a Black History’ for the National Aboriginal and Islander Day Observance Committee (NAIDOC) week poster competition in 1987. The coloured ink and paper based two-dimensional object (44.5 cm x 63cm) functions as the primary tool for promoting NAIDOC Week activities around Australia in 1987. The design features a rolled paper scroll against a black background, with a large snake forming a silhouette of Australia and an assemblage of indigenous people and motifs spread throughout the composition, with red and blue printed text below. Nilsen has used a palette of warm and natural earthy tones of ochre, red and black to represent Indigenous figures and iconography including a stockman riding a horse in front of Uluru; a man wearing a dhari (traditional dancer’s headdress); rock paintings; a mother and son watching a tall ship; a soldier in a trench and a portrait of rugby player Mark Ella, recipient of Young Australian of the Year in 1982. The text ‘White Australia has a Black History’ is a slogan that alludes to Australia’s long-standing reluctance to meaningfully acknowledge Aboriginal people and perspective in the telling of a national history and was the theme when Perth hosted NAIDOC week in 1987 (Pearson 2016). Continue reading “‘White Australia has a Black History’ NAIDOC week poster, 1987”→

‘This is our land and we are proud of it. After all, you white fellows weren’t the first to discover Australia—we were here first.’ Charlie Carter[1]

This poster shows a map of Australia produced by the Aborigines Advancement League in 1971. Entitled ‘Koorie Boogaja’, this eloquent graphic illustration shows Aboriginal tribal boundaries traced across the Australian continent, with a key provided to locate each tribe. Measuring 60 x 70 cm, the sub-heading ‘School Project’ shows the aim of this poster was to encourage students to develop and build an awareness of the history and complexity of Aboriginal Australia and the creator of the map—the Aborigines Advancement League— is written at the base. Continue reading “‘Koorie Boogaja’ 1971”→

Initially compiled by George Seelaf, the inaugural Arts Officer of Victorian Trades Hall Council, this collection of political posters was donated to the University of Melbourne Archives by Trades Hall secretary Brian Boyd in 2006 (2006.0038). In addition to the union campaign posters and various papers, photographs and audio recordings, the collection comprises political and activist art produced by broader organisations sympathetic to the labour movement. Five posters in particular address the theme of Aboriginal self-determination and identity, and were produced by the Victorian Aborigines Advancement League, Melbourne; National Aboriginal and Islanders Day Observance Committee (NAIDOC), Canberra; Community Media Association (later CoMedia), Adelaide; the Australian Film Institute, Melbourne; and Winja Ulupna: Aboriginal Women’s Alcohol Recovery House, Melbourne. Created and distributed for a range of audiences, each item responds to a different aspect of the Indigenous activist movement in Australia. Spanning a period of 20 years from the early 1970s, they capture the growing intersection of Aboriginal Australian political activism and resistance with the labour movement by the early 1990s. The digitisation of these posters will increase accessibility to the collection while also developing new links between the visual culture of paper-based political posters and contemporary online political activism in the labour and Indigenous rights movements. Continue reading “The Trades Hall Poster collection”→